Photographs by Felipe Neves and Kaldor Public Art Projects/Peter Greig

We are entering the second week of Marina Abramovic: in Residence, a transformation in the rules of how performance art functions and is presented to the public. Here, Abramovic is shifting the paradigm. She is simply the conductor, and it’s the public who live and feel the experience. Such a shift has been part of the artist's career beginning with The Artist is Present, at the MoMA, and put fully put into practice in 512 Hours, at the Serpentine Galleries. By experiencing her performances, members of the public become participants who take time to truly get in touch with themselves.

Marina Abramovic: in Residence takes place in Sydney, Australia. Located just beneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the Walsh Bay Pier, the huge industrial warehouse that houses the two-part exhibition offers a breathtaking view of nature.

Downstairs

The public is invited to experience the Abramovic Method through various exercises which include Counting the Rice, Looking at the Colors, Slow Motion Walk, and Mutual Gaze. The Method was developed over decades of research on performance and immaterial art as a way for artists to prepare for creating performances. It proves useful, however, for everyone as a way to be more in touch with themselves and to investigate their own mental and physical limits. In a world where things change so fast and information is so broadly available, the chance to explore one’s own consciousness is crucial. The Method delivers a way to be present through art to the general public.

Upstairs

Twelve Australian artists are living in the warehouse for the duration of the exhibition, mentored by Abramovic in an intensive Artist Residency Program curated by Sophie O'Brien and Emma Pike. The artists are fully immersed: they sleep, eat, and breath the residency, going through an intense routine which includes daily morning sessions with Abramovic, research, creation, and rehearsal during the day, as well as screenings and talks in the evening. The public is also invited to watch them and, most importantly, to participate in their performances, which explore contemporary views on subjects as diverse as politics, intimacy, gender, neuroscience, identity, psychology, and failure, among others.

Marina Abramovic: In Residence is free and open to the public until July 05, 2015 @Kaldor Public Art Projects, Pier 2/3, Sydney - Australia from 12pm - 7pm.

Throughout Marina Abramovic: in Residency, Abramovic is the conductor of the exhibition space, but is the public who embarks on a physical and emotional journey.

This Tuesday, June 30, Marina Abramovic will present a keynote address– her only live talk during the residency– addressing the latest development in her career, the audience experience, and the transformative power of long durational works on the public.

Keynote Address: Marina Abramovic is part of Marina Abramovic: in Residence, the artist’s latest project in Sydney, Australia, at Kaldor Public Art Projects. The keynote will be held at 8pm ACST (6am EST). MAI will be live tweeting the event. Talk to us @hudsonmai.

NATALIE ABBOTT

Natalie Abbott, MAXIMUM, 2014. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti

Natalie Abbott creates sensory performance experiences. She is committed to the idea that everything is choreography, including light, sound, movement and design, and she utilises this vision when devising work. Abbott has been making her own work; touring throughout Europe, Asia and America; and working with independent choreographers and visual artists in Melbourne, the United Kingdom and New York. Natalie is a collaborator for the DEEP SOULFUL SWEATS (fantasy light yoga project) at CHUNKY MOVE, and has recently been invited to FOLA and Next Wave Festival opening party, 2014. She recently spoke alongside Stelarc on a panel ART and the BODY at the Wheeler Centre for Ideas for the Festival of Live Art in Melbourne.

Natalie aims to work through the concept of failure throughout the residency, using repetitive movement and vocal exercises to investigate a new physicality reached through exhaustion. She is intrigued by moments where failure generates honest problem solving within a performance, generating a kind of ‘authenticity’. Natalie is also interested in experimenting with the relationship between light and sound through choreography in the absence of the performer throughout the program.

Frances Barrett is a Sydney-based artist whose practice explores performance through symbolic and direct action. Barrett’s work is informed by queer and feminist methodologies and recent projects have taken the form of body-based live actions, endurance performance and sonic experimentation. Since 2005 Barrett has worked as part of the performance and video collective Brown Council whose work interrogates modes of collaboration and the history of feminist art practices. From 2009-13 Barrett was Co-Director of Serial Space, a space that was dedicated to supporting and presenting live and experimental art forms. In 2014, she presented work as part of Day for Night at Performance Space (Sydney), SafARI (Sydney), Tiny Stadiums Festival (Sydney) and Restaging at Alaska (Sydney). In 2015 she will be performing work at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Sydney) and Australian Experimental Art Foundation (Adelaide), while also curating Haunting at Firstdraft (Sydney). She is currently Curator of Contemporary Performance at Campbelltown Arts Centre and host of FBI Radio arts show, Canvas.

The Residency Program will enable Frances to undertake an intensive period of research and development towards a new body of work. Throughout the 12-days Frances will look at the intersections between body-based practice, sound practice, and recorded actions. As part of her research she will embark on a series of performative experiments, group conversations, interviews, and listening exercises to explore how live performance can be translated into a sonic experience. Frances intends to respond to the context and environment of the Kaldor Residency Program and to apply the skills taught by Marina Abramovic to the development of this new body of work.

CLARK BEAUMONT (Nicole Beaumont and Sarah Clark)

Clark Beaumont is the Brisbane-based collaborative duo Nicole Beaumont and Sarah Clark. Through both live and mediated performance works they investigate ideas and constructs around identity, female subjectivity, intimacy and interpersonal relationships. Clark Beaumont are the subjects for their work and their collaboration means exploring the social and physical dynamics of working together to create artwork.

Clark Beaumont formed in 2010 at QUT, Brisbane whilst completing their Bachelor Degrees in Fine Arts. In 2013, Clark Beaumont were selected as the 13th addition to the 27th Kaldor Public Art Project, 13 Rooms, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbach. In 2014, Clark Beaumont held their first solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery and were selected by QAGOMA as the 2014 recipients of the Melville Haysom Memorial Art Scholarship. They also received Highly Commended at the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize and this year will exhibit in ‘GOMA Q: Queensland Contemporary Art’ at The Gallery of Modern Art.

During the residency program, Clark Beaumont intend to gain new perspectives and knowledge of contemporary live performance practice. Through temporarily opening up their normally insular collaborative process to include Marina Abramović and the other artists in residence, the duo will engage with new concepts, techniques and approaches to making live work. They will extend upon their research into the constructs of performance, and the complex dynamic between viewer and performer.

Lottie Consalvo's practice traverses performance, video, photography, installation, painting and sculpture; she explores emotional and psychological conditions. Created from fragments of the everyday and fractures from significant life events, her work deals with tragedy and longing. In her long durational and endurance based performances, Lottie endures discomfort both physically and psychologically. She re-lives past events where audience often witnesses her undergoing a psychological change in real time.

Consalvo's most recent live performances at Alaska Projects, Tiny Stadiums Live Art Festival, The Lock-Up, Newcastle, and Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery. These works have positioned her in seemingly comfortable domestic environments almost still or moving occasionally, however often slumped and in discomfort. In her performances, tragedy, desire and longing are all present. Consalvo also makes what she calls 'life performances'. Her most recent being Compartmentalise 2013-2014, a year-long performance where the artist lived with minimal possessions in an attempt to gain psychological control after a significant life shift.

The engagement in conversations with Abramović about the processing of ideas, performance in everyday life and the documentation of temporal work are key hopes for Lottie throughout the residency program. The opportunity to undertake the Abramović method will impact on Lottie's habitual life that will ultimately become her work. Spending time in conversation with the other artists in the residency, individuals working on the project and those who are part of the public program are also great prospects for her time at the Pier.

NICOLA GUNN

Nicola Gunn, Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster. Photo: Sarah Walker

Nicola Gunn is a first-person artist. She directs herself, performs herself and reveals herself. Sometimes she even tells the truth. As a performance maker she finds parallels between personal experiences and larger social realities; her work uses subversive humour to reflect on and respond to contemporary culture, people and places.

She uses a multi-disciplinary approach to explore modes of performance and often makes work consistent with post-modern types of metafiction – works that put or display the idea of 'truth in fiction’ and ‘fiction in truth.’ To do this, her work tries to be open-ended using non-linear narratives and the juxtaposition of different genres and artforms to show continual slippages of self. Gunn’s artistic practice is committed to institutional critique, social engagement and generating works that activate the public sphere by questioning old ways of being or proposing new ones. She critically reflects on the role of performance in theatres, to examine power relations in existing organisations and to consider the relevance and social function of art itself.

Gunn’s work has been presented at the Melbourne Festival, Brisbane Festival, Melbourne Theatre Company NEON Festival, Dublin Theatre Festival, Festival de Keuze (Rotterdam, NL), Vitalstatistix, Theatre Works, and – with choreographer Jo Lloyd – at the NGV, Gertrude Contemporary and West Space amongst others. She has received commissions from Theatre Works, Malthouse Theatre and Performing Lines/Mobile States. In 2013 Gunn was the recipient of an Australia Council Creative Australia Fellowship.

Feeling that success might dull the critical edge of her work, Gunn will be using this residency to begin producing private performances for herself and eventually, for smaller audiences. These untitled and intimate experiments will range from small-scale excavations of everyday behaviour to large-scale happenings and all-night parties. If conceptual art proclaims that the idea for a work is more important than its execution, Gunn asks if a conceptual performance needs to be performed at all or if the thought behind it needs to be articulated? In other words, what happens when the artist stops doing anything.

George (Poonkhin) Khut is an Australian artist and academic at UNSW Art and Design, working across the fields of electronic and participatory art, interaction design and health. For the past 12 years he has been working with biofeedback technologies, creating intimate, body-focussed participatory artworks, that re-frame our experiences and representations of embodiment, presentness and body-mind interactions. Khut works with biofeedback technologies to challenge popular assumptions about the impact of digital technologies on the body. He challenges the idea that technology minimises our ability to pay attention and uses technology instead to slow down and focus our attention into our body, the bodies of others, and the psycho-physiological dimensions of our being.

In 2012 Khut was awarded the Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, National New Media Art Award, for his heart rate controlled interactive artwork Distillery: Waveforming – a work developed as part of his residency at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead (Sydney), where he collaborated with Brain Injury Specialist Dr Angela Morrow on a heart rate controlled application for use with children undergoing painful procedures. Recent exhibitions include The Heart Library Project, exhibited this year in the Group Therapy group exhibition at FACT (Liverpool, U.K.), and MoCA Taipei (Taiwan, 2012), ThetaLab presented at ISEA2013 (Sydney), and Cardiomorphologies presented at the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth, 2007, and InBetweenTime 2006, at Arnolfini (U.K.).

For the residency program, Khut will be developing a new work combining brainwave-controlled sound-designs, with audience participation and story-sharing, working with experiences of stillness and presentness frequently reported by people undergoing Alpha neurofeedback training, and the experiential narratives and visualisations that arise from these interactions. Khut’s interest here is in the potential of neurofeedback technologies to facilitate experiences of presentness and stillness, the artistic implications for working with (interactive) sound in this way, and what it can mean for people when they observe that they can voluntarily focus and sustain their attention and presence in this way.

Sarah-Jane Norman is an Australian artist and writer of British and Indigenous Australian heritage with ties to both Wannarua and Wiradjuri Nations, currently working between Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom. Trained originally in devised theatre and movement practices, her work traverses performance, installation, sculpture, video, text and sound. Norman's primary medium is the body: the body as a spectacle of truth and a theatre of fantasy; a siphon of personal and collective memory; an organism with which we are infinitely familiar and eternally estranged; a site which is equally loaded and empty of meaning, where histories, narratives, desires and discourses converge and collapse.

Her work has been presented widely, including Venice International Performance Week (IT), Spill Festival of Live Art (UK), Fierce Festival (UK), In Between Time (UK), Arnolfini (UK), Performance Space (AU), Next Wave (AU), the Australian Experimental Art Foundation (AU), Edinburgh Festival (UK) and Brisbane International Festival (AU).

CHRISTIAN THOMPSON

Christian Thompson. Photo courtesy the Artist.

Christian Thompson is an Australian born, London-based photographic, conceptual and performance artist who’s work explores notions of identity, cultural hybridity and history. Formally trained as a sculptor, Thompson’s multidisciplinary practice engages mediums such as photography, video, sculpture, performance and sound. His work is primarily focuses on the performative exploration of identity, sexuality, gender, race, ritual and memory. In his performances and photographic works he inhabits a range of personas achieved through handcrafted costumes and carefully orchestrated poses and backdrops and is known for his evocative photographic self portraits and video works.

In 2010 Thompson made history when he was awarded the Inaugural Charlie Perkins Scholarship and became the first Aboriginal Australian to be admitted into the University of Oxford in its 900-year history. He holds a Doctorate of Philosophy (Fine Art), Trinity College, University of Oxford, Britain, Master of Theatre, Amsterdam School of Arts, Das Arts, The Netherlands, Masters of Fine Art (Sculpture) RMIT University and Honours (Sculpture) RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia and a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Queensland.

SARAH RODIGARI

Sarah Rodigari. Photo courtesy the artist.

Sarah Rodigari creates performances that address economies of exchange pertaining to socio-political engagement, shared authorship and new institutional critique. Working at the intersections of theatre, visual art and social practice her method is responsive and context specific. Recent projects take the form of lecture, text, video, collaboration and curation.

Rodigari has presented work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, Melbourne International Arts Festival, South Project (Indonesia), PACT Zollverein (Germany), Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, The National Review of Live Art (UK), Anti-Contemporary Arts Festival (Finland), and SOMA (Mexico City). Sarah has a BA (Hons) in Sociology (UNSW), a Masters in Fine Art (RMIT) and is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Art at the University of Wollongong. She recently published a chapter on performance art, and sympathetic magic for the publication Travel and Transformation and co-edited the book Going Down, an anthology of contemporary Sydney performance. Rodigari is a founding member of the collective Field Theory; who make and support art projects that cross disciplines, shift contexts and seek new strategies for intervening in the public sphere.

Rodigari’s approach to making work includes responding to the project brief in the site where the work is presented. In short this means she won’t know what will happen until she arrives at Pier 2/3. The artwork will be realised in the process of its making, live in the present moment and in relation to the viewer.

ZIN (HARRIET GILLIES & ROSLYN HELPER)

zin is the artist partnership of Harriet Gillies and Roslyn Helper. Formed in 2011, zin's work focuses on the power of experience by combining immersive, visceral and hybrid-art elements. Through their work they are interested in developing methodologies and concepts that deal with the public sphere, immaterial performance modes, largescale execution, site specificity, audience immersion and activation. zin continuously redefine the audience-artist relationship by creating generative environments that encourage new ways of thinking and interacting.

zin have presented work at PACT (I’ll Have What She’s Having, 2015), Firstdraft (Karaoke For Wankers, 2015), Sydney Festival's Parramatta Opening Night Party (Take A Shot, 2014), the Festival of Live Art in Melbourne (Make The Call, 2014), Underbelly Arts Lab and Festival (zin’s Party Mode, 2013), City of Darwin's National Youth Week Festival (Make The Call, 2013) and Tiny Stadiums Festival (The Dictator’s Ball, 2013). zin received a JUMP mentorship grant from the Australia Council in 2013 and have participated in residencies and programs across Australia. Gillies attained a Graduate Diploma of Performing Arts (Directing) at NIDA and Helper completed her Masters in Arts Politics at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

This residency is an exciting opportunity for the duo to develop new creative risks by pushing aesthetic and conceptual boundaries. Under the guidance of Marina Abramović , zin will use the residency as a space to enact heightened levels of bravery in performance both for themselves and audiences. zin's aims for the residency also extend to developing their language for performative communication with fellow resident artists through exercises in duration and presence. zin hope to find new ways of communicating with each other, with other artists and with audiences.

Marina Abramovic: In Residence is free and open to the public until July 05, 2015 @Kaldor Public Art Projects, Pier 2/3, Sydney - Australia from 12pm - 7pm.